Page 15 of Power Play
“I blocked a shot in the second, it’s nothing, don’t—”
But Theo had already found it, the deep purple bloom over the floating rib, and instead of being careful around it, Theo bent his head and pressed his mouth to it, soft, deliberate, a tenderness so total in the middle of all the fury that Shane’s knees actually went, and he sat down hard on the edge of the bed and Theo followed him down, came over him, huge and warm and finally, finally not calm at all.
“You block shots like you are trying to die,” Theo said, low, against Shane’s sternum, working down. “Every game. I watch you. I have watched you all season give your body away for a team that did not draft you, a coach who yells at you, a city that does not know your name, and I think, who taught this man he was only worth what he gives,” and Shane’s eyes stung, blurred, because nobody had ever (nobody saw that, nobody was supposed to see that) and Theo looked up the line of him and said, “tonight you give nothing. Tonight someone does for you. Let me.”
“That’s not — that wasn’t the deal—”
“The deal is torn,” Theo said. “You tore it. In the kitchen.” And he got Shane’s belt open, Shane’s fly, dragged the sweatpants down off his hips, methodical, unhurried even now, and looked at him, hard and flushed and already wet at the tip, looked long enough that Shane’s face went hot in the dark.
“You gonna stare at my dick all night or you gonna put that mouth to work?”
“Quiet,” Theo said. Not loud. It landed in Shane’s gut anyway, and Shane shut up, and Theo wrapped one big hand around him, a first slow pull root to tip that punched the air out of him, and then another, watching Shane’s face the entire time with that flat blue attention that had never once in five months been pointed at Shane’s pleasure and was now pointed at nothing else.
“Theo. Theo, c’mon, you can’t just do that to a guy.”
“I can,” Theo said, and put his mouth on him.
Shane stopped talking, gloriously, the loudest man in the league struck dumb for three whole seconds, one hand fisting in Theo’s hair and the other flat on the back of Theo’s skull, his head going back, his whole body a string pulled to its limit and held there. Then the talking came back, because it always came back, because Shane Novak had never once shut up in his life, and it came back filthy.
“Oh my god, okay, okay, your mouth, you’ve done this, no way you haven’t done this, nobody’s a natural at this, fuck, Theo, your tongue, right there, right there, don’t you dare stop, if you stop I’ll die, I will die in this bed and you’ll have to explain it to immigration.”
Theo pulled off him, deliberate, and Shane made a noise of pure betrayal.
“You said it means nothing,” Theo said, conversational, his fist still moving, slow, too slow, keeping Shane right at the edge of the boil and not letting him over it.
“It means nothing, it means nothing, nothing has ever meant less in the history of meaning, put your mouth back.”
“Ask better.”
“Please. Okay. Please suck my dick, you giant Swedish menace,” and Theo did, and the rest of whatever Shane had planned to say died.
He’d expected, in whatever animal part of his brain had been imagining this (and it had been imagining this, he could admit it now, for days, for weeks), he’d expected it to be like the fights. Fast and mean and over. It was not. Theo took him apart with patience, with thoroughness, learning him, reading him the way he read a rush. He worked Shane slow and deep and then slower, tongue and the flat heat of his mouth and one big hand wrapped around the base, the other splayed on Shane’s stomach where the muscles jumped, finding the spots that made Shane swear and the spots that made him beg and filing them with that terrible flat focus turned entirely on Shane’s pleasure, pulling off to drag his tongue up the underside while Shane babbled at the ceiling, taking him deep again until Shane’s heels dug into the mattress. Every time Shane’s hips tried to chase it Theo’s forearm came down across them, pinning him, that maddening control, holding Shane open to it instead of letting him take it.
“Harder, you can go harder. Yes. Yes. God, your hand, squeeze, like that, exactly like that, Theo, I’m close, I’m so close, I’m gonna come, you should—”
Theo’s answer was to take him deeper and hum, low, around him, and the warning became the event. Shane came in Theo’s mouth with his spine arched off the bed and a sound torn out of him he’d never made for anyone, swearing, both hands in Theo’s hair, and Theo took it, took all of it, swallowed, kept his mouth on him through the aftershocks until Shane was twitching and pushing at his head, too much, too much, and then pulled off and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and Shane lay back on his own bed, wrecked, gasping, and was, for once in his stubborn life, taken care of.
“Okay,” Shane said to the ceiling, when he had a voice. “Okay. Wow. Get up here.”
When it was Theo’s turn Shane went after him clumsy with it, too eager, hands shaking as he got Theo’s slacks open, shovedthem and the boxers down his thighs, got his fist around him, thick and hot and already leaking, heavier in his hand than he’d let himself imagine, and Theo’s breath came apart above him.
“Do that again,” Theo said, rough, when Shane found a stroke that worked.
“Yeah? This?” Twist at the crown, thumb through the slick of him. Theo’s hips stuttered. “Tell me. Talk to me, big guy, I want to hear it. What do you want?”
“Go down,” Theo said, the two plainest words, and they detonated in Shane harder than a paragraph of filth would have, because Theo Lindgren did not ask for things, had built a whole life around not asking, and he had just asked.
“Yeah,” Shane said. “Yeah, you got it,” and put his mouth on him, took him as deep as he could and let spit and his fist cover the rest, sloppy and loud about it and not embarrassed, learning the weight and the salt of him, the velvet-over-iron heat, pulling off to mouth at the base, to drag his tongue back up, to say “you taste good, you know that, I’ve been thinking about this since Ohio, since the stupid banquet, you in that suit,” and Theo above him making a punched-out sound at every word, the words doing as much as the mouth.
The careful man came undone in increments: the clenched jaw going slack, the hiss of air, the hand fisting in Shane’s hair without pulling, the low Swedish word he didn’t translate, the helpless roll of his hips that he caught and stilled and then stopped bothering to catch. “Don’t stop,” Theo said, and then, quieter, ruined, “Shane,” and then, “fuck.” One syllable. Flat. The first time Shane had heard him swear in English in five months of marriage, and it went through Shane hotter than everything else combined. Then a word in Swedish that sounded begged. Shane watched the wall come down brick by brick, drunk on it, on being the one who could do that, on reaching the man under the man, and worked him faster, mouth andfist together, humming, merciless, until Theo’s whole big frame went rigid and his hand spasmed in Shane’s hair and he came with Shane’s name buried inside a Swedish word, pulsing hot over Shane’s tongue and his knuckles, more than Shane was ready for, and Shane took it anyway, all of it, and kept his fist moving slow until Theo caught his wrist, done, oversensitive, breathing in great ragged pulls, a full penalty kill’s worth of breathing.
They moved together in the cold dark after, the radiator ticking, the bruises forgotten, the bad shoulder cradled safe between them by an instinct neither of them named, and at the end Theo held him through it, his good arm locked across Shane’s back, and Shane let himself be held, and did not narrate, and did not deflect, and the silence was the most honest thing he’d done in a year.
* * *
After, they lay on their backs in the dark, not touching now, a careful inch of cooling air between them, both staring up at nothing, and Shane’s heart was still hammering, a shift just finished, and the panic was already coming back, the what did I do, the my mother, the deal, the line he’d pressed so hard into a napkin.
“That was a mistake,” Shane said, to the ceiling.
